Eons ago I met a young lady and we went to a restaurant on our first date. I quickly chose what I wanted and set my menu down. While she read the details of the offerings, I just sat back and gazed at her beauty – until she looked up and asked, “What?”
I knew it was rude to just plain stare at people, so I fired off a quick excuse, “Sorry, its just…uhh…you reminded me of my mother’s dog.”
“Oh, really?” she responded while turning her attention back to the menu.
“Yeah,” I confirmed while picking up on a behavioral trait, “She also moves her lips when she reads.”
“Oh!” my date blushed and explained, “I don’t, really – well not normally – it’s just that I have these glasses I use for reading and I forgot them and…well, maybe I’m straining because the letters on this menu are so small and…”
“Okay.” I smiled and shrugged and reassured her, “It’s okay. Nothing wrong with it either way.” So she was content and went back to reading the menu and we ordered and had a fine meal talking about all sorts of things for over an hour.
And then she decided she would splurge so she asked for the dessert menu. I decided to pass, so I just sat and enjoyed gazing at her beauty again. At first, she moved her lips while reading the first item on the dessert list. Then she stopped, no doubt as she recalled the opening conversation. And then she frowned, glared at me, and asked, “Her DOG moves her lips when she reads?!?”
I think we laughed about that for about half an hour.
Freshman year in college, very early '80’s, I really got into Carlos Santana among others, my GF at the time was a senior in HS, I had sent her tapes and letters about Santana (before the Internet, we wrote letters and sent tapes), as soon as I got home for the summer, I learned he was playing at MWPP in Columbia, MD, I was able to get great pavilion seats, something like 11th row center, four songs into the show, she was amazed, turned to me and gushed, “He’s really good, but his guitar player is AMAZING!!”, I was like, “Um, ah, yeah, well, he is…”
When my daughter was a teen I had one of her friends thoroughly convinced that key lime pie was a bit expensive because:
You see, it’s made only from “key” limes - that’s the first lime that grows on a tree each year. It’s called the “key” lime because it is critically important. Once the key lime is picked, no other fruit will grow on that tree the remainder of the season. Citrus farmers mark the key lime on each tree, and only allow it to be harvested at the very end of the season. Ergo, key lime pie is expensive because only one key lime grows on each tree and it takes about 25 limes to make a pie - more limited supply = higher price. Simple economics.
She texted my daughter the next day to say she had looked it up online and I was wrong.
My grandpa was a fireman. Many times, people/tourists would stop at the fire station and ask for directions. When my grandpa was feeling feisty, he’d tell them “sorry, you can’t get there from here”. And they’d thank him and drive away!!
A coworker liked to tease a girl at work. She was sweet, charming, and a little gullible. He told her to put her hands on her knees, then stood behind her. Then he told her to spell “run” two times.
So there she was, hands on her knees, saying “R-U-N. R-U-N. Wait, why is everybody laughing at me?”
This reminds me of a story I’ve been thinking of telling. When I was in high school, one year I had as home room and math teacher someone who was in her first year of teaching. A blonde recent runner up for Miss South Carolina, she had to have had some intelligence to get a math degree and a teaching job (even calculus) but damn did she fit the “dumb blonde” stereotype and the students picked up on it quick. One time I witnessed another student (during home room, I think) ask her to look down her shirt and spell “attic.” Which she did, in front of the whole class, looked confused about it, and never got it.
(She also once told another high school math class an anecdote from when she worked in a mall clothes store and a man came in, stripped off all of his clothes and hid in a rack, where he masturbated and “came all over a mirror.” And in one I was in, she had been leaning against a chalkboard and had ink from the tray all over her butt and a male student two seats in front of me told her, and she told him to wipe it off. So a teenage boy was dusting off her butt in front of the class with a grin so wide that the top of his head almost fell off.)
Back in grad school I needed to get something from the Law Library. So I tromped over to the Law College, walked in the front door and asked a young woman relaxing in a comfy chair where the library was.
She looked at me, mystified, then slowly pointed behind me.
I turned to see a glass wall, behind which were dozens of bookshelves, and above which was a large sign reading “LIBRARY”.
As a teenager I worked as a lifeguard at a fairly large Scout camp every summer. We also were responsible for camp maintenance and working in the kitchen, whenever needed. We had an abundance of naive people and too much time on our hands to play with newbies.
Favorites included sending people for 50’ of shoreline, the skyhook, the blueberry peeler, a pot of fresh steam, etc…
One afternoon during a power outage, we instructed the “Coolies” (new kitchen helpers) to start loading in and stacking firewood in the middle of the kitchen so we could cook dinner. The stoves were huge old cast iron beasts with several compartment doors on the front.
One guy did protest and said “I thought these were gas stoves?”
“Yes, they are, but they are electric start. These are dual purpose and have a firebox in case of situations such as this” I explained while pointing at the warming drawer underneath.
“Oh, that’s smart!” they all agreed.
After they’d stacked about a cord beside the stoves, the kitchen manager arrived and lost it, “What the fucking hell is all this wood doing in my kitchen!?”
AND THEN!!..the “smart guy” began to explain to her how these stoves are designed to work in a power outage…
I honestly believe this to be the moment when I developed a hernia
I was always puzzled about tire rotation. My maintenance manual says I should do it every 5,000 miles. But aren’t the tires rotating every time I drive the car?
